To meet today's market requirements, metal parts manufacturers are turning to new technologies and processes as well as new implementations. Among these processes is the powdermetallic (P/M) production where low cost, high volume precision parts are efficiently manufactured. This process along with its benefits brings new challenges, including the need for a full quality assessment and control of each part, in other words one hundred percent testing. The ability to directly detect flaws as early as possible in the manufacturing cycle, in conjunction with the possibility to perform in-situ evaluations of components, will reduce overhead and improve yield. Today's process lacks this ability and relies only on indirect methods such as the measurement of weight along with statistical sampling to perform more comprehensive part evaluation through the measurement of density and using destructive methods to study the integrity.
For the above reasons, it would be beneficial to provide an apparatus and method for testing powder metallurgy parts directly and early in the manufacturing cycle.